“There was another patient ahead of me in the waiting-room. He was sitting there quietly, humbly, with all the terrible resignation of the very poor.” Woolrich’s first crime story, “Death Sits in the Dentist’s Chair” (Detective Fiction Weekly, August 4, 1934), offers a vivid picture of New York City during the worst of the Depression, a bizarre murder method (cyanide in a temporary filling), and a race against the clock to save the poisoned protagonist — elements which would soon become Woolrich hallmarks. In his next dozen tales (all of them plus his debut story included in my 1985 collection Darkness at Dawn) we find the invasion of nightmare into the viewpoint character’s workaday existence, a Hollywood movie-making background, first-person narration by a woman, casual police brutality, intuition passed off as reasoning, terror in a milieu of jazz musicians, the use of Manhattan landmarks as settings, inexplicable evil powers that prey on man, set-pieces of nail-biting suspense, whirlwind physical action, the James M. Cain theme of the guy who gets away with the murder he did commit but is nailed for one he didn’t — in short, the first appearances of countless motifs and beliefs and devices that would recur throughout his later fiction, including the stories collected here.
Between 1936 and 1939 Woolrich sold at least 105 more stories as well as two book-length magazine serials, and by the end of the decade he had become a fixture in mystery pulps of all levels of quality from Black Mask and Detective Fiction Weekly to cheapies like Thrilling Mystery and Black Book Detective and had also appeared in Whit Burnett’s prestigious general fiction magazine Story. His stories of this period include historical adventures, Runyonesque comedies, gems of Grand Guignol, even an occasional tale of pure detection, and range in quality from magnificent to abysmal, but very few lack the unique Woolrich mood, tone and preoccupations. Among those that remain fresh today are the oscillation thrillers, the races against time and death, the fast-action whizbangs, the portraits of scratching for survival in the Depression, the haunting evocations of the world’s malevolence. Woolrich is at his best when he sets a protagonist in a hopeless situation and forces us to share that person’s ordeal, dying a thousand small deaths as the man or woman in whose shoes we are trapped flails through streets that, in Raymond Chandler’s immortal phrase, are dark with something more than night. “Two doomed things, running away. From nothingness, into nothingness... Turn back we dare not, stand still they wouldn’t let us, and to go forward was destruction at our own hands.” Even his titles tend to reflect the tension and anguish. “The Night I Died.” “Dusk to Dawn.” “I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes.” “Three O’clock.” “Charlie Won’t Be Home Tonight.” In his tales of 1934-39 Woolrich created, almost from scratch, the building-blocks of the literature we have come to call noir.
The best physical description of the man who spun these bleak visions comes from his pulp contemporary Steve Fisher (1912–1980), who used Woolrich as the model for the brutal and love-tormented homicide detective Cornell in I Wake Up Screaming (1941). “He had red hair and thin white skin and red eyebrows and blue eyes. He looked sick. He looked like a corpse. His clothes didn’t fit him... He was frail, grey-laced and bitter. He was possessed with a macabre humor. His voice was nasal. You’d think he was crying. He might have had T.B. He looked like he couldn’t stand up in a wind.” Imagine a painfully introverted man, living in hotels with his mother, going out almost never, the torments of his fictional characters mirroring his own. That in a nutshell is Woolrich.
In 1940 he joined the migration of pulp detective writers from lurid-covered magazines to hardcover books. In his first overt crime novel, The Bride Wore Black (1940), he writes in cool unemotional prose of a mysterious woman named Julie who enters the lives of various men and, for reasons never explained until the climax, murders them. Woolrich divides the book into five freestanding episodes, each built around a symbolic three-step dance. First a chapter showing Julie, each time in a new persona, preparing the trap for her current target; then the execution of her plan, each victim being ensnared in his own romantic image of the perfect woman; finally some pages dealing with the faceless homicide cop who’s stalking the huntress through the years.
This first in Woolrich’s so-called Black Series was followed by The Black Curtain (1941), the masterpiece on the overworked subject of amnesia. Frank Townsend recovers from a three years’ loss of memory, becomes obsessed with learning who and what he was during those missing years, and finds love, hate, and a murder charge waiting for him behind the curtain.
Black Alibi (1942) is a terror novel about a killer jaguar menacing a South American city while a lone Anglo hunts a human murderer who may be hiding behind the jaguar’s claws. This time Woolrich dropped his quintessential themes of loneliness and despair and concentrated on pure suspense, and the result is a thriller with menace breathing on every page.
The Black Angel (1943) deals with a terrified young wife’s race against time to prove that her convicted husband did not murder his girlfriend and that some other man in the dead woman’s life is guilty. Like Julie in The Bride Wore Black, she enters the lives of several such men, of whom one at most is the killer she’s looking for, and in one way or another destroys them all and herself too. Writing in first person from the wife’s viewpoint — a huge risk for an introverted loner who never knew a woman intimately — Woolrich makes us feel her love and anguish, her terror and desperation, her obsessions that grow to madness inside her like a cancer as she flails the world like a destroying angel to save her man from Mister Death.
The Black Path of Fear (1944) tells of a man who runs away to Havana with an American gangster’s wife, followed by the vengeful husband, who kills the woman and frames her lover, leaving him a stranger in a strange land, menaced on all sides and fighting for his life. The earlier chapters, with their evocations of love discovered and love destroyed, their sense of what it must be like to be alone and hunted through a nightmare city of the mind, demonstrate vividly Woolrich’s claim to be called the Hitchcock of the written word.
In Rendezvous in Black (1948) grief-crazed Johnny Marr holds one among a small group of people responsible for his fiancee’s death and devotes his life to entering the lives of each of that group in turn, finding out whom each one most loves and murdering these loved ones so that the person who killed his fiancee will live the grief he lives. This is The Bride Wore Black with the sexes reversed and the structure as it should have been: with the explanation of the serial murders at the beginning so that we have some clue how to respond; with a genuine noir cop instead of a cipher in the role of hunter stalking the killer through the years; with a wealth of heart-stopping suspense and anguish instead of cool objective narration; with the forces of chance and fate kept in perfect balance; with a strong climax lacking The Bride’s monkey tricks of plot manipulation. Woolrich as usual punches ridiculous holes in the continuity, but on the visceral level where his work stands or falls this is a masterpiece.